YMMV / Pokemon S 3 E 18 Charizards Burning Ambitions

• Ass Pull: The idea that it's unfair for Ash to have Charizard for no other reason than most trainers he goes up against don't have such a powerful pokemon. Ash trained Charizard just as any trainer would train their pokemon. In fact, he had to work harder to do so because he had to fight to earn Charizard's respect after it evolved from a Charmander. And Charizard's power is only so noticeable because the rest of Ash's team hasn't evolved yet (if they can evolve at all); for a trainer that went through the entire Indigo League, having a fully-evolved starter is the minimum to be expected. In other words, Ash is supposed to give up his ace for the sake of other trainers who lack such a fallback, and the audience is not supposed to question this reasoning whatsoever.This would be a main carry over excuse for Ash leaving all his Pokémon (sans Pikachu of course) at Oak’s whenever he goes to a new region.
  • Making this worse is this same poor reasoning could be said about Pikachu, who's already been established as being unusually powerful for its species. But since Pikachu is the mascot, of course, that's ignored, which makes it so much more obvious the writers just needed any reason to get Charizard out of the picture.
• Tearjerker: Ash's reluctant goodbye to Charizard.
  • Charizard's flame almost going out when he is in the lake.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: The way Ash says goodbye to Charizard can make him unintentionally come off as an asshole. Even if he was doing it for Charizard's sake so he wouldn't feel conflicted about staying, the way Ash does it is by faking the idea he thinks Charizard is weak and isn't worth taking with him... Ya' know, the exact same reason his previous trainer abandoned him over and what caused him to have such a bad attitude upon evolving in the first place? Even though Charizard figures out what Ash is doing relatively quickly, it can still make Ash's departure from him hard to take seriously, especially compared to how he handled Pikachu potentially leaving him.
• The Woobie: Charizard is this throughout the whole episode.

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